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Monday, June 15, 2015

Op-Ed: Jews are Excluded from European Universities. Does it Ring a Bell?

In 2002, the year of the beginning of the academic campaign against Israel, Paul Zinger, the head of the Scientific Association of Israel, revealed that more than seven thousand scientific research projects are sent from Israel abroad every year. Dozens of scientific papers were returned that year, with the terse explanation: "We refuse to examine any document from Israel". That phenomenon now seems out of control.

"The academic boycott is illegal according to all academic organizations in the world," says Professor Zvi Ziegler, a mathematician at the Technion (Institute of Technology in Haifa) and head of the main scientific forum fighting the boycott. "It is against progress, so you will not find universities or European academics who officially boycott Israel. But many do silently, behind the scenes".

Among the silent measures taken by the boycotters is refusing to participate in conferences held in Israel, ignoring requests to write letters of recommendation for Israeli scholars looking for promotions, and refusing contributions from Israeli scholars.

This happened to Oren Yiftachel, a leftist Ben Gurion University scholar, whose publication, sent to the magazine Political Geography, was refused by their saying that they did not accept anything that came from the state of the Jews.

The publishing house of St. Jerome in Manchester, specializing in translation and linguistic research, has refused to send academic volumes to Bar Ilan University in Israel. The English magazine, Dance Europe, refused to publish an article about Israeli choreographer Sally-Anne Friedland, Richard Seaford of the University of Exeter refused to review a book for the Israeli magazine Scripta Classica Israelica. more